Love of Home: My Place-Based Education Kit

During an intensive 3 week period at the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives I developed an education kit comprised of 14 fascinating objects and artifacts. This suitcase can be borrowed by K-12 educators for hands-on learning about the history of the Sunshine Coast. The kit comes with extensive textual and multi-modal resources.

Please learn more here:

https://www.sunshinecoastmuseum.ca/education-kit.html

The box includes an example of red cedar bark weaving that I had the chance to create during a workshop with local shíshálh Nation weaver, Jessica Silvey. In the Museum of Anthropology video below she explains the significance of local cedar weaving knowledge and practices.

I am interested in the connection between "place based education" and the philosophy of "oikophilia" (love of home) developed by the late Roger Scruton. Scruton argues that our rootlessness is a prime cause of modern alienation and that an understanding of our local heritage helps connect us to home. Our need for home and our desire to preserve good things is in keeping with human nature. He explains that our love of beauty (environmental and the built environment) and our shared heritage contributes to “the transgenerational view of society that is the best guarantee that we will moderate our present appetites in the interests of those who are yet to be.” (216). Here he is informed by the philosophy of Edmond Burke which holds that ‘we the living are connected to the dead and the unborn by conserving the precious inheritance that we have received from those who have passed before us for those who have yet to be born.’

I believe that grassroots activities which unite a community in the conservation of culture and the environment can help close political polarization by crossing the political divide. I am interested in exploring how our aesthetic sensibilities are connected to environmental conservation, cultural conservation and our love of home.

References

Scruton, R. (2012) How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. Oxford University Press.

https://www.scruton.org/